Company:

Jordan’s Furniture got its start in
1918 in Waltham, Massachusetts,
when the founder sold furniture
out of the back of his truck.
Today Berkshire Hathaway owns
Jordan’s, and it has developed
into a leading furniture retailer in
New England with six locations
and more than 1,000 employees.
Jordan’s is much more than a
furniture store, however. Various
locations feature IMAX 3-D
theaters, restaurants, rides, a
trapeze school, a water show and
ice cream parlors.

Industry:

Challenge:

Solution:

results:

Reliable backup saves
troubleshooting time

High-speed recovery
restores VMs, files and items
in minutes

Frequent replication of
critical VMs guarantees
5-minute RPOs

About ExaGrid:

ExaGrid provides backup storage
with a unique landing zone
and scale-out architecture. The
landing zone provides for the
fastest backups, restores and
instant VM recoveries. The scaleout
architecture includes full
appliances in a scalable GRID and
provides for a fixed-length backup
window as data grows, eliminating
expensive forklift upgrades. Learn
more at www.exagrid.com

The Business Challenge

Shortly after virtualizing its IT infrastructure on VMware vSphere, Jordan’s Furniture
realized its backup tool wasn’t performing as well as expected. Backups failed more
often than they succeeded, and sometimes they never executed as scheduled.
Recovery was extremely slow, taking up to one day. Unreliable backups, sluggish
recovery and a limited number of backups didn’t allow Jordan’s to reap the full
benefits of virtualizing its data center to support the business.

Approximately 150 virtual machines (VMs) run most of Jordan’s critical applications
and data such as Web servers that support e-commerce and Microsoft Exchange,
Active Directory and SQL Server that support daily business operations, including the
point of sale system.

“We never really felt the backup tool was intended for virtualization because it lacked
fundamental features,” said Ethan Peterson, Network Engineer at Jordan’s Furniture.
“It wasn’t aware of backup folders, so every time we built a VM, we had to manually
assign the VM for backup. That may sound minor, but over time those types of things
take a toll on workflow, resulting in wasted time and money.”

Peterson said his company needed a backup solution designed for virtualization, but
it had to provide much more than just reliable backup.

“We also needed high-speed recovery, replication for our most critical VMs and ease
of use,” he explained. “We wanted to ‘set it and forget it.’”

The Veeam Solution

Jordan’s chose Veeam® Backup & Replication™ for two reasons.

“Veeam offers the most features available for virtualized environments,” Peterson said.
“This includes features you’d assume like automated deployment of VM backups and
features you’d think might be complicated, such as restoring groups from Active
Directory—but they’re not complicated because Veeam is extremely easy to use.”

Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft Active Directory is just one of Veeam’s flexible
recovery features designed for virtualization. When a user accidentally deleted a
group record in Active Directory, Jordan’s IT team recovered it in three minutes.

“Prior to Veeam, this type of restore wouldn’t have been possible,” he said. “Recovery
with the previous backup tool would have been so laborious that it would have been
faster to rebuild the VM.”

Peterson said the second reason Jordan’s chose Veeam is because Veeam integrates
so well with ExaGrid, which the company already used as its backup target. For
example, the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover takes previous full and
incremental backups and makes a new, full backup recovery point without placing
demands on primary storage and the network, resulting in fast, reliable backup and
recovery.

“Compared to the previous backup tool, backup with Veeam is much quicker and
more efficient, and whole VM recovery is a completely different story, saving us time
and headaches.”

Peterson is referring to a Veeam customer favorite, Instant VM Recovery®, which lets
Jordan’s restart a failed VM from a backup on ExaGrid’s landing zone—a high-speed
cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in complete
form.

“Instant VM Recovery was a big selling point for us, not only because it restores
quickly, but also because it enabled us to thin out our virtual environment,” Peterson
said. “Before Veeam, we’d upgrade a server, turn off the VM and wait a few weeks
before decommissioning it. Then we’d back it up one final time before deleting it.
With Veeam, we decommission a VM right after an upgrade, do a final backup and
delete it. We know if we need anything later that we can use Instant VM Recovery.
Veeam gives us peace of mind and lets us reclaim space fast. There’s a tendency to
forget about decommissioned VMs, and several of them represent a decent chunk of
storage.”

Another way Jordan’s saves on storage is by using Veeam’s source-side deduplication
with ExaGrid’s zone-level deduplication, resulting in a 2:1 deduplication ratio and
lower storage costs.

“Veeam’s deduplication, backup and recovery are more powerful with ExaGrid, and so
is replication,” Peterson said.

By using Veeam to replicate critical VMs between the data center and disaster
recovery (DR) site, Jordan’s guarantees multiple recovery points. If there’s a software
or hardware malfunction, the IT team can quickly recover a corrupted VM by failing
over to its replica at the DR site. Team members have the choice of failing over to
the latest state of a replica or to any of its restore points, enabling 5-minute recovery
point objectives (RPOs).

“The combination of Veeam and ExaGrid is very compelling,” Peterson continued.
“You get the best backup and recovery available for virtualization. Veeam and ExaGrid
have made our lives easier.”

The Results

Reliable backup saves troubleshooting timeJordan’s doesn’t worry about failed backups anymore because Veeam backup
is reliable. “On the odd occasion that a backup fails, Veeam alerts us so we can
rerun the backup job,” Peterson said. “Failed backups occur very infrequently
with Veeam, which means we don’t waste time troubleshooting failed backups
like we did in the past.”

High-speed recovery restores VMs, files and items in minutesJordan’s relies on Instant VM Recovery to restart a failed VM from a backup on
ExaGrid’s landing zone and Veeam Explorer for Active Directory, Exchange and
SQL for instant visibility into backups for item recovery. For example, restoring
individual emails from an Exchange backup takes minutes with Veeam. It took
up to one hour with the previous backup tool.

Frequent replication of critical VMs guarantees 5-minute RPOsAfter Jordan’s fails over to the latest state of a replica at the DR site, it fails
back to recover the original VM in the data center. Frequent replication of
VMs throughout the day, provides multiple restore points to choose from,
eliminating the risk of data loss.

Why Veeam?

Try now

How to buy

Jordan’s Furniture got its start in
1918 in Waltham, Massachusetts,
when the founder sold furniture
out of the back of his truck.
Today Berkshire Hathaway owns
Jordan’s, and it has developed
into a leading furniture retailer in
New England with six locations
and more than 1,000 employees.
Jordan’s is much more than a
furniture store, however. Various
locations feature IMAX 3-D
theaters, restaurants, rides, a
trapeze school, a water show and
ice cream parlors.

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